These sites are growing amid the rollout of new European privacy regulations and numerous corporate data scandals, which have raised public awareness about the mountains of personal information companies stealthily gather and sell to advertisers.

Widespread suspicion in Europe about Google’s stranglehold on internet searches has also helped make the continent a spawning ground for secure searching. Europe is particularly sensitive to privacy issues because spying by the Nazi-era Gestapo and the secret services in the Soviet Union is still within living memory.

“For us, it’s all about citizens and citizens have the right to privacy,” said Eric Leandri, chairman of Qwant, based in Paris. He said that view contrasts with the mind-set across the Atlantic, where internet users are seen as consumers whose rights are dictated by the terms of their agreements with tech companies.

Traffic numbers show interest is rising. Qwant’s queries tripled to 10 billion in 2017. On a monthly basis, it’s getting 80 million visits while requests are growing 20 percent. Leandri says the site now accounts for 6 percent of search engine market share in France, its biggest market.

Qwant is even getting official support. Last month the French army and parliament both said they would drop Google and use Qwant as their default search engine, as part of efforts to reclaim European “digital sovereignty.”

The site doesn’t use tracking cookies or profile users, allowing it to give two different users the exact same result. It has built its own index of 20 billion pages covering French, German and Italian and plans to expand it to about two dozen other languages, for which results currently come from Microsoft’s Bing.

To be sure, Google’s in no danger of toppling. The Mountain View company accounts for three-quarters or more of global market share, depending on whom you ask, and rules the mobile market with its Android operating system.

Mojeek, based in Brighton, England, operates on similar principles and has so far cataloged 2 billion web pages. The company says it gets 200,000 unique visitors a month and search queries have quintupled over the past year.

Another British startup, Oscobo, does anonymous searches for users with results licensed from Yahoo/Bing. Startpage of the Netherlands anonymizes Google search results, stripping out ads and tracking.

Pat Walshe, a British privacy consultant, has been using Startpage and Qwant for years and says he has never felt their services were inferior to Google’s.

Walshe likes Startpage’s new “anonymous view” feature, which goes a step further by letting users browse a copy of a website from its search results, not the actual site.

Germany’s Unbubble is a meta-search site, sending encrypted queries to more than 30 other search engines. It promises neutral search results rather than ones filtered by an algorithm catering to personal biases.

Outside Europe, there’s also U.S. site DuckDuckGo.

Some privacy search operators say it’s equally important to help users avoid “filter bubbles,” in which content is selected by the likes of Google and Facebook based on previous searches and other data.

“The main idea is to provide neutral information and allow people to depend less on machine learning-based filters,” said Unbubble founder Tobias Sasse. “If you are using Google today, perhaps you’ll notice that there is always the same mainstream information,” preventing people from seeing the “great diversity” online, he said.

Some sites rely on donations, others from “affiliate advertising” — links from shopping sites that pay a commission but don’t target or track users. That’s different from Google, where behavioral ads come up based on a user’s search history, which many find creepy and invasive.

In Switzerland, a country whose banking sector became a byword for secrecy, Swisscows has thrived, with monthly search queries jumping by nearly half to 20 million from a year ago, said founder Andreas Wiebe, who also runs software company Hulbee.

Related Articles

Phoenix, Arizona – Increased SEO means higher chances of getting local businesses and brands noticed. Medical enterprises are no different. The Dental Boost is the premier SEO company for growing Invisalign revenues for an orthodontist. […]

(Cartoon by Nina Paley via commons.wikimedia.org.) Contribute to Independent Australia Would you like to contribute to Independent Australia and get paid for it? Independent Australia is one of Australia’s most popular news websites, with thousands of people […]

Search company Yelp and lobby group Consumer Watchdog lost their joint bid to intervene in Googleâs challenge of a 2.4 billion euro ($2.7 billion). Photo: (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, File) INTERNATIONAL â Search company Yelp and lobby […]

Canada is considering whether to force social media companies to remove hateful and extremist content online. That comes after a spate of terrorist attacks in New Zealand, Quebec City, Pittsburgh and other places where right-wing [...]

Brief Brief: Facebook Ads remained the top network for mobile apps during the second half of 2018, partially due to its performance in gaming, according to a new performance index by AppsFlyer, a provider of [...]

In your quest to master business-to-consumer (B2C) digital marketing strategies, you may be overlooking some important business-to-business (B2B) opportunities. The recent economic upswing — reports of an economy on the rise and decreased unemployment — provides tremendous [...]

Opera, yesterday, in a new version update, added a free VPN service to its Android browser. The Norwegian company had previously experimented its VPN service as a standalone (Android & iOS) app in 2016 and [...]

In your quest to master business-to-consumer (B2C) digital marketing strategies, you may be overlooking some important business-to-business (B2B) opportunities. The recent economic upswing — reports of an economy on the rise and decreased unemployment — provides tremendous […]